Godless Review

Scott Frank wrote and directed all seven episodes, with Steven Soderbergh producing, and it plays like a long film cut into chapters. Jeff Daniels is Frank Griffin, a one-armed outlaw whose gang has just massacred the mining town of Creede, and Jack O'Connell is Roy Goode, the protégé who rode off with the gang's money and turns up wounded at the ranch of Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery), a widow living outside La Belle.

La Belle is the better idea: its men mostly died in a mining accident, and Merritt Wever's Mary Agnes, the late mayor's widow, blunt, fearless and in love with the town's schoolteacher, is the most alive character in the series. She and Daniels both won Emmys. Steven Meizler's photography makes New Mexico look vast and indifferent, and Carlos Rafael Rivera's theme won an Emmy of its own.

The trouble is the one the trailers created. Sold as a No Man's Land run by women, the series keeps cutting back to the men, and the middle episodes wander through subplots about a mining company and a Santa Fe newspaperman before the long, superbly staged battle that ends it. Alan Sepinwall argued that the format's excesses made it more fun than a film version would have been, which is generous but not wrong.